Pilot: "We just wanted him to replace the drone, and now he’s selling T-shirts."

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Updated: As you may have noticed, since we published the story the pilot of the drone has changed the video to "private." The story below describes the video in some detail, however.

Original story

The pilot of the drone that was recently shot down over a Louisville, Kentucky, suburb has posted a new video showing the device's short flight. The film doesn’t even last 90 seconds.

The video depicts a quiet flight from what looks like a rural property and headed toward some residences. Other than a few brief pauses to look around side-to-side, the drone flies smoothly ahead... until the last 22 seconds of the video. It hovers and tilts the camera toward the ground, observing a number of houses before it gets struck by the shotgun blasts and falls to the ground.

Further Reading

While the video has some strange jumps and cuts, possibly indicating it was edited, the pilot, David Boggs, said it was not.

"Obviously there’s some kind of button in the app that you’re supposed to switch to make it not [flicker]—the video is 100 percent not edited," he told Ars, admitting that he is very new to the DJI Phantom 3's software.

Boggs added that he is "definitely going to be filing a lawsuit."

The shooter, William Merideth of Hillview, Kentucky, did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment on Monday. Previously, Merideth told Ars that he opened fire as soon as it was above his property.

"It was just right there," he told Ars. "It was hovering, I would never have shot it if it was flying. When he came down with a video camera right over my back deck, that's not going to work. I know they're neat little vehicles, but one of those uses shouldn’t be flying into people's yards and videotaping."

In an earlier interview with ABC, Merideth also said, "We live in a society now where we don't know what these people are doing. We don't know if they're pedophiles looking for kids, we don't know if they're thieves. We don't know if it's ISIS."

Further Reading

Merideth was arrested on a late July evening in Hillview, Kentucky, just south of Louisville. He was charged with criminal mischief and wanton endangerment and was released the next day. Currently, Merideth is scheduled to appear at a hearing in September for the pending criminal charges.

"At first we just wanted him to replace the drone, and now he’s selling T-shirts," Boggs added. "He wants to be the center of attention, when the center of attention is misleading."

UPDATE 3:40pm CT: Ars was able to reach Merideth by text message, who wrote: "Nothing much to say. His own video proves he was hovering over my house!"

Ars also texted with Boggs, who clarified that he first flew the drone to a road that sits roughly between the two families' properties, providing an aerial satellite photo of the area. However, this road sits on the opposite side of an empty lot that is adjacent to Merideth's property.

During its first flight, the Phantom apparently gave an error message and could not fly past this road without a setting change. So, Boggs brought it home, fixed the settings and swapped its battery—giving time for Merideth to go inside, retrieve his shotgun and wait for the drone to return.

Boggs also said that Merideth's back deck "sees clearly into our land," but noted that the men had never interacted prior to this incident.

Merideth, for his part, told Ars that he had done some sort of investigation on Boggs, and said: "this guy has a very bad background." When Ars asked him to elaborate, he wrote: "We will save that for court! You have a computer, look him up."

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Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar